Blogs :: TelecomWeb broadbandWednesday, November 7, 2007
The User Bill of Rights is something that’s needed by everyone involved in combining data and voice (and with increasing frequency video and presence) on IP networks to deliver the benefits of unified communications, including the end customer who is... [read more]
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
My wife is calling me on my Motorola cellphone, but I can’t hear it ringing. That’s because the phone, for reasons known only to itself, has decided to set itself to silent ringing. I had set the phone on “Vibe and Ring.” But my... [read more]
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Back in the bad old days, there was a phone company un-affectionately dubbed by some as “USWorst,” with customer disservice derided as “Mountain Bull” – but that was before the CEO from a lot of those bad old days was convicted... [read more]
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Decision makers in all sizes of companies are considering using professional services between 2008 and 2010 to help them adopt the right Voice over IP (VoIP) and convergence assets. This increased interest in professional services is most likely the result of... [read more]
Sunday, September 9, 2007
There’s nothing like a nice lightning storm to destroy what must have been tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of modems and other electronic goodies around the neighborhood where I live, a situation that, of course, creates an instant... [read more]
Thursday, August 30, 2007
This is one of the most predictable times of the year here in Washington. Most of the decision-makers are gone, the staffs are trying to catch up on the various piles of work that have accumulated over the past few months while still leaving early and taking... [read more]
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
I’m about to risk the life of my computers by plugging their Ethernet ports into the electric power outlets in my house. Let me explain. I’ve been writing about broadband over powerline (BPL) extensively for almost three years now. In general, my... [read more]
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Somebody is not online. Actually, lots of somebodies are not online. And therein lays the failure so far of PC-based instant messaging (IM) and VoIP to supplant traditional time division multiplex (TDM) plain old telephone service (POTS). To be more... [read more]
Monday, July 30, 2007
So here’s a challenge: How do you market a “new” product that has been around for more than a hundred years and that almost every household in the United States already has? It’s just as difficult as creating the next must-see TV... [read more]
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
It didn’t take more than a matter of hours for the flow of offers from various “pure play” VoIP providers to start, following the untimely death of “pure play” VoIP provider SunRocket, as everyone in the business started... [read more]
Friday, June 29, 2007
Yes, if I walk out in the driveway (I only live about 35 minutes outside of Washington, D.C.) and hold my phone high in the air, I may be able to get one or two bars, but that’s it. Get close to the house, and it’s gone. Same is true for most of... [read more]
Thursday, June 7, 2007
A good friend of mine is just about ready to enter the dream retirement after 30 years with a major car manufacturer, building a sizable 401(k) and putting both daughters through college. And he still hasn’t hit 55 (and that’s SO galling)... [read more]
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Boy oh boy, they don’t make electronics the way they used to. To hell with Moore’s Law (I used to know Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, by the way, very slightly). Forget about all the “advances” of the last quarter-century. What... [read more]
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Gosh, I’m all Joost up – I just watched my first, fully commercial (not beta) IPTV shows delivered over the Internet. Joost (pronounced “juiced”) is the brainchild of the same techno whizzes that gave us Skype – which I in... [read more]
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The hot-diggity-dog buzzword right now is "convergence," particularly of VoIP and conventional wireless telephony. Well, we ain’t really there yet but, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been having fun testing one of the raft of... [read more]
Thursday, April 12, 2007
I still find it amazing how easily some folks knuckle under to terrorism and hate – like the DSL Forum, for instance. Or perhaps it’s just a case of uncaring ignorance. I just got a press release from the Forum trumpeting “DSL Forum... [read more]
Friday, March 30, 2007
The Federal Corporation Commission took a shocking step when they decided to actually gather information about a topic before they make a rule saying how they are going to regulate it. They approved an inquiry exploring how companies that provide high-speed... [read more]
Thursday, March 15, 2007
By: By Stuart Zipper
The latest figures show that just about every type of broadband backhaul known to man is now booming, with only one exception – free space optics (FSO). How sad. After years of struggling, the technology, which consists of a pair of... [read more]
Thursday, March 8, 2007
I have a feeling it may be weeks before the industry discovers whether it has survived the new earlier March 11 date for daylight savings time or whether the Congress and the president have foisted on us a "Daylight Savings Crime." ... [read more]
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Boy, it’s a good thing we’re not fighting a war with terrorists in our own territory right now. Like in Washington, D.C,. where, if memory serves me, on 9/11 a plane flew into the Pentagon and another was to be aimed at the White House. And... [read more]
Thursday, February 15, 2007
The FCC is now catching on to what everyone in this business already knows: the country needs a national broadband plan. To be fair, FCC insiders have been well-aware of this for several years now, though the in-house experts have not received much guidance... [read more]
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
My partner sent me a recent article from The New York Times, "Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs," written by Randall Stross. The essence of the article is that Apple (Computer) Corporation has behaved insensitively and arrogantly in its design... [read more]
Monday, February 5, 2007
The Internet, it seems, is making it harder these days for folks to get a fair trial – and not simply because of the instant transmission of news. To explain, I just finished a couple of days of fulfilling my obligation as a U.S. citizen to serve... [read more]
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
A reader wrote this morning with a question about the role of communications technology in our global competitiveness: “I have a question for you concerning the future of broadband in the U.S. With Verizon and AT&T rolling out FiOS and u-verse... [read more]
Friday, January 26, 2007
Wow. I would have never thought of using sex to sell wireless broadband subscriptions. But that’s exactly what Moscow’s Golden Telecom is doing. To explain - I was writing a story about Golden Telecom’s new municipal Wi-Fi network... [read more]
Monday, January 22, 2007
Well, well … it looks like the FCC, in cahoots with both the nation’s telcos and cablecos, doesn’t want the hoi poloi (that’s us guys, the great unwashed public) to know where broadband really is available. The Center for... [read more]
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
So here I sit in Sin City – Las Vegas – covering the massive Computer Electronics Show and guess what – no Internet and no GSM cellular service in one of the two massive press rooms set up for the show. No bars, if you will. Actually... [read more]
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
By: Stuart Zipper
With a heavy heart, I’m posting this item from 35,000 feet up in the sky, cruising at 700 miles per hour somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on one of the last flights in the world that will feature broadband access, at least for the... [read more]
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
The votes are in and, right now, broadband still is losing. Just for fun, I made an attempt to follow the election results using nothing but IPTV - video delivered over my broadband connection to the public Internet, not an IPTV service feed that replaces... [read more]
Thursday, October 19, 2006
I’m not sure if it's Cingular or Motorola that messed this one up, but a few months ago my cellphone started getting billed a few pennies every now and then for data transfers in the dead of the night. Cingular can’t figure out why, but... [read more]
Monday, September 25, 2006
A couple of weeks ago, I got pitched by 'net neutrality” advocates who had put together an idiot presentation that included the plea to “keep our Internet free.” My connection to the Internet isn’t free … it costs... [read more]
Monday, September 11, 2006
Qwest tends to get bashed more than the other RHCs in my blogs for the simple reason that I live in a Qwest service area. So to be fair, this time I’m going to report that Qwest did, in fact, respond quickly to a call for help I placed about my DSL... [read more]
Monday, August 28, 2006
Gee, I wonder which model Nokia phone it was that this past weekend’s winner of the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship was hefting. Maybe it’s the same one I recently traded in for some Motorola hardware. No matter. The cellular phone... [read more]
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
By: Stuart Zipper
Somebody in Sprint has a lot of guts, the skill of a gambler or perhaps it's just a death wish: Sprint just made big headlines by choosing what's being called 'mobile WiMAX' for its 4G network.The problem is that so-called mobile WiMAX doesn't exist yet... [read more]
Friday, July 28, 2006
Oh my, in my enthusiasm for writing about the broadband industry I almost forgot our heritage. But a press release from CML Microcircuts, announcing new semiconductors to support dial-up, that made its way to my inbox recently reminded me of something ... [read more]
Monday, July 24, 2006
I''m impressed. I got a WiMAX story pushed my way by a company that told the truth about what WiMAX is. Wow. Finally. None of the stuff about WiMAX being a technology or a standard or anything like that. The story came from Aperto, telling... [read more]
Thursday, July 20, 2006
A few weeks ago I received a press release from the Recording Industry Association of America that said it would classify top-selling "Master Ringtones," defined as " tones that use actual music and vocals from artists' work,"... [read more]
Thursday, July 13, 2006
By: Stuart Zipper
So the great news in the high tech community so far this week is that venerable venture capitalist house New Enterprise Associates (NEA) has put together a new fund with $2.5 billion to invest – its largest ever. That’s a lot of cash for startups... [read more]
Thursday, July 6, 2006
By: Stuart Zipper
AT&T started rolling out its Microsoft TV-based IPTV just as last month ended - hardly a surprise to our readers, who had been forewarned by weeks - though the consumer press and much of the make-believe trade press covered it as a "gee whiz ma"... [read more]
Friday, June 30, 2006
Got another phishing e-Mail, this one a bit more clever than most. It was the supposed “confirmation” of my purchase of a Sony camera, with payment via my PayPal account. The dead giveaway was that it was addressed to my business e-Mail account... [read more]
Friday, June 23, 2006
I think I’ve discovered the worst phone system in America, . It’s owned by Frontier Airlines. And the worst flight reporting system on the web. It's used by Frontier Airlines.Let me explain … my daughter was flying home from New York... [read more]
Thursday, June 22, 2006
II was writing about the pontential acqusition of Hong Kong's PCCW and suddenly realized just how globalized things have really become. If I have it right the story is about a Texas venture capital... [read more]
Friday, June 16, 2006
Confirming one of the worst kept secrets in the history of the industry eBay has launched its use of Skype technology to let e-Bay bidders contact sellers with their questions and comments. Was it worth $1.9 billion to buy the technology to do that... [read more]
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Sources say that BT's rethought some of the architecture of its much-vaunted 21CN next generation network, and decided it should have opted for carrier class Ethernet in the last... [read more]
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Once again I have been blindsided by the siren lure of a hotel promising "high speed" broadband. This time I'm in Chicago, covering Globalcomm, and staying at Club Quarters, a business-oriented hotel whose lures include allegedly free... [read more]
Thursday, June 1, 2006
I'm looking at a press release from Aperto Networks with the headline "BeotelNET Deploys Aperto Networks WiMAX Equipment." Only one little problem - what BeotelNET bought isn't WiMAX. In the body of the release it admits that the Serbian carrier... [read more]
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
A week or so ago a friend of mine who uses Vonage sent me an e-Mail asking if he should buy into the Vonage IPO - he had received one of their SPIT messages offering him shares. I don't give stock advice, and indeed I avoid like the plague buying... [read more]
Friday, May 19, 2006
Oh boy is Nortel out beating the drums, following its latest good news -- that its first quarter results will *%/#, um, er ... lets say won't be what they'd like them to do be. But the future will be better, we are all promised. Nortel... [read more]
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
The news that eBay's Skype is going to let its North American users make free calls to PSTN telephones in the U.S. and Canada has the industry guessing - is Skype running scared? Or perhaps petrified, would be more the word for it. Skype had been... [read more]
Monday, May 15, 2006
Globalcomm, one of the two shows that emerged from the Supercomm divorce, is now only a couple of weeks away so of course I'm deluged with requests by companies to stop by the booth "for a few... [read more]
Friday, May 12, 2006
How clever. Vonage is offering its loyal customers - those with accounts between December 15 of last year and February 1 - the right to buy into its planned IPO at the offering price. What a creative way to legally hype an IPO that the company has also... [read more]
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
I’ve been pondering the recent “news” that eBay’s trophy VoIP acquisition Skype now has 100 million registered users (and I’m one of them). Then there’s the... [read more]
Monday, May 8, 2006
Things have been blissfully quiet around my house around dinner time for years now ever since the no-call list was instituted but, thanks to VoIP, it looks like that’s starting to change. I just got off the phone with someone who tried to pitch a... [read more]
Thursday, May 4, 2006
I finally broke down and bought myself a fancy new Motorola cell phone (no, it wasn’t a Razr) from Cingular with Bluetooth built in. Got me a dongle. Installed the software … and nothing would work right. Why didn’t I expect this... [read more]
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
I just wrote yet another big IPTV story, and I remain jealous as all get out … because I live in Denver, a Qwest service area, and IPTV here is as much of a dream as in Zambia, Namibia, you name it. The 1.5 Mb/s ADSL service I get sounded good... [read more]
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Just got a call from the folks at Spanish broadband over powerline (BPL) chip company DS2. They read my story about their battle with American BPL chip house Intellon. No argument about what I wrote – the fact is, I gave DS2 a near exclusive story to... [read more]
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